Ending the Experiment: “The Good Place” Final Season

WARNING: SPOILERS

Everything Is Fine

Ever since those words first appeared on viewers’ screens in 2016, audiences all over the world have been captivated by the supernatural sitcom “The Good Place,” a unique show that deals with the ethics of the afterlife.

The series focuses on Eleanor Shellstrop, a small town woman from Arizona with a big problem: She is dead. Throughout the first season, she grapples with a form of Heaven called the Good Place, where she soon realizes that she does not belong. After many trials and tribulations, she and three other Good Place inhabitants realize that they aren’t in the Good Place at all. Rather, they’re in the Bad Place (a version of Hell), a simulation being run in an attempt to trick four unknowing participants (Chidi, Tahani, Jason, and Eleanor) into believing that they are in the Good Place, while simultaneously ruining their afterlife in the process.

The rest of the series mostly revolves around their escaping the Bad Place, as well as reforming the Heaven/Hell placement system in order to fix long-standing injustices. While the nitty-gritty of theoretical afterlife politics may not sound like the most gripping of plots to base a TV show, “The Good Place” quickly proves this to be false.

Led by an all-star cast of new and familiar faces, including Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, Jameela Jamil, William Jackson Harper, and D’Arcy Carden, the show balances comedy, ethics, and a breakneck-paced story to provide a completely unique viewing experience. However, as the series finishes its fourth and final season, fans are curious to know how it’s all going to end; if any show deserves a good ending, it’s this one.

When dealing with the ending of any form of entertainment, it is imperative that the showrunners get every detail just right. A disappointing ending can taint the viewing experience for fans forever—just look at “The Office” (2005-2013). “The Good Place” has created such a high standard of quality for this show by consistently having funny, emotional, and thought-provoking episodes, that the bar is nearly unattainable for this final season. Pobody’s Nerfect. However, I believe that by adding a few key elements to the mix, “The Good Place” can have a truly satisfying conclusion.

Showrunner Michael Schur has consistently provided us with surprises at every turn: uncovering the Good/Bad Place mixup, finding out that the gang was part of a Bad Place experiment at the end of the first season, and realizing that demon meddling has prevented new Good Place inhabitants for over 500 years. While there have been minor revelations in the fourth season so far, I believe that in order to stay true to its roots, season four needs a killer twist that would make even the cleverest fans second-guess everything they thought they knew about the show. Perhaps the whole plotline of season four, an experiment that is run by our protagonists in order to decide the fate of millions of future afterlife inhabitants, is a facade run by the Bad Place demons in order to torture our heroes further. Perhaps the Judge who’s running the whole experiment (charmingly played by Maya Rudolph) is actually a demon in disguise. Whatever the twist, it’s imperative that something even more drastic than the Janet catastrophe goes down. It’ll be one last reminder of why we fell for the show way back in the first season.

Another aspect of the season that could give the show the ending it deserves is the reunion of Chidi and Eleanor. At the end of the third season, the couple are forcefully split up after Chidi wipes his memory in order to save the experiment from certain failure. While Chidi stays in blissful ignorance of his relationship history with Shellstrop, the latter is painfully aware of the hard goodbye she had to say to her former lover, so a reunion is just what the show needs to pull off the two’s collective story arc. How they reunite is up to the writers, but it is clear that they must reunite, not only as an act of fan-service, but also because it’s the right thing to do.

However, I do not believe that a perfectly happy ending is the best thing either. While the show finds a way to stay fun and comedic throughout, at its core, it deals with incredibly heavy topics such as death, moral imperative, and free will. To brush these aside and give our characters everything they’ve ever wanted in the final episode would be a complete 180 from the show’s direction for the last four years. While I don’t think that all of the protagonists should end up miserable, it would be a betrayal of the show’s main values to provide every single one of the characters with exactly what they wanted.

The first four episodes of the final season of “The Good Place” have thus far been slow in comparison to the rest of the show, which is alarming to many fans. However, if you watch the episodes looking for little clues in the background and see past what meets the eye with many of the plotlines (Glenn coming to warn the heroes about Michael, Michael not taking off his skin suit, etc.), it is clear that the showrunners are preparing for something big. Some things just don’t add up, and you can be sure that this is all going to blow up in the faces of some unsuspecting viewers at any moment. However, there is a delicate balance between giving the fans what they want and giving the characters what they deserve. I believe that with the above points, Michael Schur and his “Good Place” team can build up the final episodes into a satisfying and well-deserved conclusion.

Even if the show ends up going in all Jeremy Bearimy directions, you can expect season four of “The Good Place” to be a wild forking ride no matter what.